It’s been a long time since we’ve had the chance to update the main site for ZDay, in truth the game has gone through a very tough time this last year or two with the loss of several of the development team. Our loyal community members have kept us going though and making sure we stay motivated and working hard, for those that haven’t been following the forums then let me just say emphatically;

Z DAY IS NOT DEAD

We’ve gone through a major rebuild and transformation this last few months – we’ve got some great new developers and the game has now been converted to the Unity game engine with some amazing results. This gives us a great platform and a great team to be able to develop and build much much faster than we were able to before, making the release of ZDay not only possible but probable.

Well it’s certainly been quiet on the ZDay development scene. For the past 8 months or so the Dev Team has been all busy with work, study, school and general day-to-day stuff. If we were getting paid for developing ZDay we would have sacked ourselves by now.

A large part of the problem is that ZDay has grown to such a point that it really does require a team effort to move forward, so when most of the lead developers are not able to dedicate time to ZDay development grinds to a halt. There is only so much an individual developer can do before they require help or input from the other developers.

The past 6 months have seemed have been pretty quiet for ZDay. Unfortunately most of the ZDay development team have been busy getting on with other areas of their lives and haven’t had a lot of time to devote to the game. Remember, no-one on the team is getting paid, we’re doing this for the love, blood, sweat and tears, and because we want to make a zombie MMOFPS. However, we have been making progress.

It’s been quite a few months since my last blog regarding Z-Day and us starting to delve into developing a Pathfinding solution for Torque using a NavMesh rather than the more traditional waypoint grids used in the resource posted on the site.

Unfortunately work has been really busy so I’ve not had anywhere near as much time to work on it as I’d hoped for, I know I know the injustice of it all, just because they pay my wages they expect me to work on their projects rather than my own!!!! I tell ya it could go to the Supreme Court this one.

Anyhow, so what have we been doing over the last few months?? Well there’s a few things that have changed with the game and that the rest of the team have been working on.

One of the most expressive of the arts, music can have a huge emotional impact on the listener, and plays a critical role in any production. Today, I thought I would share some of the efforts that go into producing a piece of music for the anticipated video game, “Z-Day”. From scoring the music, to mixing and mastering the final product, let’s take a look at how the main theme music was created for “Z-Day”.

When it comes to producing a piece of music, everyone has a different workflow and procedure. Personally, I like to start with a short theme, or motif that the piece can grow from. For the main theme, I knew I wanted to go with something that would convey a lot of tension; leaning more towards the eerie side of things. I chose to start the piece off with a cello slowly playing a legato passage in the mode of C Locrian. Though the piece definitely has harmonies and melodies in this mode, I did not stay strictly confined to Locrian, and much of the music tends towards C Phrygian as well. I chose to write in these two modes because the melodic and harmonic possibilities were in line with what I wanted to convey. Besides, anything in Phrygian just automatically sounds awesome!